Beyond Conspiracy, Progress
By ROGER COHEN
New York Times
On the outskirts of Kandahar in Southern Afghanistan, there’s a junkyard of the Soviet empire. It’s filled with the hulls of T-55 and T-62 tanks and the tubes of multiple rocket launchers. Some of the tanks are intact. I guess high-explosive, antitank missiles penetrated the turrets and coated the interior of the steel shells with blood.
I drove past this modest memorial to imperial hubris a couple of months ago on my way to a base of the nascent U.S.-trained Afghan Army. The army needs money. It might sell those metal carcasses for scrap. Why not? The detritus of human events, and their constant ebb and flow, turn the head.
Military guys deal in worst-case scenarios. But no Soviet-era planner of the 1979 invasion could have imagined being humbled in the Hindu Kush by a bunch of Islamic holy warriors; and no American cold-war strategist could have imagined those C.I.A.-funded Islamists turning on the United States and bringing down the twin towers in 2001.
Yet all this happened. Just as it happened that the Soviets were once our allies and Communists from Central Asia raised the hammer-and-sickle on the Reichstag as Hitler’s Germany burned in 1945.
And then, the Soviets became our enemies while the Japanese, despite Pearl Harbor, became our friends. And, at last, the Soviets became Russians who were no longer enemies but rivals.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
On the outskirts of Kandahar in Southern Afghanistan, there’s a junkyard of the Soviet empire. It’s filled with the hulls of T-55 and T-62 tanks and the tubes of multiple rocket launchers. Some of the tanks are intact. I guess high-explosive, antitank missiles penetrated the turrets and coated the interior of the steel shells with blood.
I drove past this modest memorial to imperial hubris a couple of months ago on my way to a base of the nascent U.S.-trained Afghan Army. The army needs money. It might sell those metal carcasses for scrap. Why not? The detritus of human events, and their constant ebb and flow, turn the head.
Military guys deal in worst-case scenarios. But no Soviet-era planner of the 1979 invasion could have imagined being humbled in the Hindu Kush by a bunch of Islamic holy warriors; and no American cold-war strategist could have imagined those C.I.A.-funded Islamists turning on the United States and bringing down the twin towers in 2001.
Yet all this happened. Just as it happened that the Soviets were once our allies and Communists from Central Asia raised the hammer-and-sickle on the Reichstag as Hitler’s Germany burned in 1945.
And then, the Soviets became our enemies while the Japanese, despite Pearl Harbor, became our friends. And, at last, the Soviets became Russians who were no longer enemies but rivals.
(Continued here.)
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